By Mike Ayers Designed By Elana Nanscawen

“Home is where love resides, memories are created, friends and family belong and laughter never ends.”

— Unknown

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How often do you think about walls? Of course you likely think about them in the sense of “my house needs walls” or “wow, these walls are really thin, I can hear my kids way too much and they’re being gross.” But I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about what to do with a wall. I never really gave walls too much thought, and when we moved into our new South Orange house at the end of last summer, I still wasn’t thinking too hard about walls. They seemed like they were doing what they were supposed to do:

Hold the house up.

But as we started to settle in, there was a wall we’d always have to pass to get from the main part of the room to the “bedroom wing.” (I wouldn’t say it’s a proper wing; I’m not sure I really know what a proper wing is, because this is just more of an offshoot. Still, it feels great to call a part of a house a “wing” so I’m going with it.) The hallway feels a bit narrow, which gives a sensation of having the walls up on you a bit; you can feel the walls watching you, so to speak — a reminder that they’re there, and not going anywhere.

After living in our new space for a few months, those two walls must’ve started to seep into our subconscious in some form or another. Houses will do that, especially during the pandemic. You couldn’t escape them and they couldn’t escape you. So perhaps faster than normal, the house became a part of us. And we wanted to give it something back.

A fresh coat of paint can do wonders for any wall, so after dialing that up we got together a vision for this wall, one that would represent a past and present sorta thing. It became something of an homage, a collective portrait of where our family once was, with the hopes that every time we walked by it, it wouldn't necessarily evoke memories (but that would be fine if so) but instead, be like a wall of life. At some points in time, life we were never a part of but like to look at fondly with that thought of “what if,” and life that we were once a part of and no longer are.

Perhaps you’re thinking about your own walls now and how you could give life to your walls. If that’s the case, it comes highly recommended. Now, these walls to the wing have purpose, more so than they may ever have. It became one of the most important walls of our house, just like that. Our houses are filled with blank canvases that require us to think about them and use them. They’re best, we learned, when we’re telling our own stories.